Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Tough Times

Your correspondent went to a hockey game tonight. It was our second of the season, and we were saddened to find that in the intervening months, the cheerleaders have been laid off. This is surely a lagging indicator -- the economy here may or may not be bottoming out depending on who you talk to, but it will take time to trickle down to hockey ticket sales and then to hockey cheerleaders. But then again, not that I've been to a lot of NHL games, but cheerleaders have never struck me as an integral part of the hockey experience. Above is a picture from the game we attended in October, where there was a young dancing lady with pom-poms positioned at each of the entryways leading from the concourse with the beer stands to the seats.

Although our sample size is low, we can further surmise that the cheerleaders had no discernible impact, as the Riga Dinamo lost each game we've attended by two goals.

Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.